EAST HAVEN >> A two-year federal compliance report filed this week applauds the Police Department for continuing to make progress on efforts to implement “effective and constitutional policing” 24 months after signing a consent decree with the Department of Justice.

The 150-page report, filed to U.S. District Court Tuesday, was compiled by Joint Compliance Expert Rafael Ruiz with assistance from Joan Brody, Joint Compliance Expert Team Coordinator, based on data from Dec. 21, 2012, to Dec. 31, 2014. The compliance report is mandated by the consent agreement made effective Dec. 21, 2012, after a federal investigation revealed a pattern of racial discrimination against Latinos in East Haven. The investigation led to the arrests of four officers.

Ruiz wrote in the report that the change from his first visit in early 2013 to recent visits on Sept. 30 and Jan. 12 are “night and day.”

“Officers seemed to be more upbeat, polite, and happy to see us,” Ruiz said. “I now notice younger officers of different backgrounds, race, and ethnicity patrolling the streets and staffing the front desk at Police Headquarters.”

The report also applauds the departments efforts in the past to years to recruit police officers of different backgrounds, as Ruiz writes in the report that he personally saw work completed by two officers — one black and the other Latino — during a domestic situation.

“I believe that the effort put forward by the EHPD in the last two years in recruiting police candidates of different backgrounds is noticeable and is paying off substantially in the way that the EHPD is viewed by the community,” Ruiz wrote. The report also indicates that Ruiz visited Latino owned-businesses in town and spoke with community members.

Town officials, including Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr., Larrabee and Lawrence Sgrignari, the attorney representing the town, have cooperated well with the DOJ, the report said. Maturo called the cooperation a “team effort.”

“We have worked exceptionally well with the Department of Justice,” Maturo said. “I can’t say enough about all those involved. I am remarkably pleased with the progress we have made on every provision that the DOJ has asked us to do.”

Larrabee said he wanted to congratulate the men and women of the department for their hard work, as he reiterated a point he’s been making as of late that the department is becoming one of the best in the Northeast. He also thanked residents for their patience.

“We have worked tirelessly to accomplish this,” Larrabee said. “The mayor has been extremely supportive in these endeavours. We have a great team that’s put together.”

One caveat Ruiz points out is that he would like to see more officers walking the beat and interacting one-on-one with the community. The department opened a police substation earlier this month, and in a release on the opening, Maturo said one of the goals at the substation was to give residents more opportunities for face-to-face interactions with officers.

A review of use of force reports yielded no issues of importance, the federal report said, and, overall, the department has developed and implemented 87 policies and procedures in the two years since the consent decree was signed. They include revisions to uniforms and appearance, officer video camera use and the K9 Unit. The report said additional revisions and new policies are expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Traffic stops were collected and submitted by the department. In their findings, police told the DOJ that traffic stops in the last six months of 2014 are consistent with the racial and ethnic population in town. During that time, the percentage of Latinos drivers stopped by police between July 1, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2014, was 12.1 percent; that’s closer to the 8.3 percent of estimated Latino drivers in 2011, according to the DOJ Civil Rights Divisions Findings, and the 10.3 percent Latino population in the town, according to the Census. The numbers are significantly lower than the percentage the DOJ investigation found in 2011; they estimated that during a six-month period, nearly 20 percent of traffic stops involved Latinos.

However, the department did find that three officers showed a slightly higher stop rate for Latinos, though the report said these stops were not made based on the “suspected profiling” of the drivers, but rather on reasonable suspicion or probably cause. The stops were recorded on body camera footage, which the report said further supported the officers’ actions.

The report does note that information submitted by the department on stop data is helpful, but “getting an overall accurate picture of this data remains difficult,” due to the way it’s categorized. The report said the department and Ruiz are working on identifying more efficient methods of collecting and analyzing stop data.

Fourteen civilian complaints were filed in 2014, including two that claimed biased-based policing. According to the report, subsequent investigations found no instances of bias in either case. One of the complaints had been made by someone who claimed he was stopped because he was Latino.

The two-year report includes an online survey distributed to the department’s 60 officers in fall 2013, though the report said only 38 completed at least some of the survey, representing a response rate of 63 percent. The 60 officers included part-time or supernumerary officers, Emerman said, as the department has about 50 full-time police officers. Conducted by Trinity College in Hartford, the survey revealed that more than half of the officers “expressed some dissatisfaction with the department’s work environments,” but gave “favorable reviews of their colleagues, supervisors, and department disciplinary procedures.”

The survey found that on average, older officers expressed greater dissatisfaction with their work environment.

Other questions included how officers felt about discipline, as well as community and race relations.

The survey revealed, for example, that 45 percent of officers would feel “hesitant” about using a Taser, while 34 expressed hesitation in using lethal force. It also revealed that most officers, 94 percent, felt ethnic and racial relations in the town are progressing well; 64 percent of officers said the department contributed to improving these relations.